This invention relates to containers or buckets for storage of bulk or commercial quantities of generally liquid products, and more particularly, to containers for liquids designed to minimize the likelihood of child drowning.
Numerous small children, such as toddlers, drown every year by falling into open containers of water or other liquids. For the most part, the containers involved in such deaths are standard five gallon open head industrial storage buckets which were kept for usage by a homeowner for household use, such as to hold paint or a liquid cleaning solution. A drowning typically occurs when a curious child, left unattended for a short while, crawls or walks to the edge of the container and pulls himself/herself up to the rim. Looking inside, the child is attracted to the contents, or perhaps drops a toy into the container, and upon reaching in to play in the liquid or retrieve the object loses his balance and tumbles head first into the container. Due to the wide base and inherent stability of standard industrial buckets, in all likelihood the center of gravity of the contents (liquid plus child) will be positioned such that it is very difficult for the child to tip the bucket. As a result, unless an older child or adult were to discover the situation in a relatively short amount of time, severe injury or death may result.
Some surveys have indicated that as many as 40 young children a year in the United States alone die from mishaps such as these. In fact, given that the number of do-it-yourself homeowners continues to increase, that only a small amount of liquid need be present in the bucket to pose a significant drowning risk, and that a small child has a great deal of his weight distributed in the upper part of his body, it may only be a matter of time before more deaths of this nature occur.
Ways for preventing children from accidentally drowning in standard industrial buckets are known. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 5,183,179 to Morris, Sr. discloses a container having a hollow projection protruding up from the base into the interior of the bucket to a height at least one half of the height of the bucket, thereby preventing a larger child from sticking his head all the way in the bucket. However, in the Morris, Sr. product, a smaller child could still fit its body in the bucket despite this projection, and since the bucket of the Morris, Sr. invention has a footprint similar to that of a standard industrial bucket, it is no less difficult to tip. Also, since the projection protrudes through the interior of the bucket, a significant amount of the bucket's storage volume is lost.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,577,632 to Blanchette et al. discloses an apparatus for preventing accidental drowning of children utilizing a ring having various sized cutouts which is attached to the top of an otherwise standard bucket. However, in the Blanchette et al. invention, as in the Morris, Sr. invention, nothing is done to increase the tippability of the bucket, and thus if a smaller child were to slip through one of the larger cutouts, he would be unable to tip the bucket to get out or spill the contents away from his nose and mouth. Furthermore, the cutouts in the ring attachment restrict access to the bucket, making it difficult for a user to access the contents of the bucket.
Accordingly, a need exists for a container for preventing accidental drowning of children which has a certain degree of inherent stability when in use, yet which is easily tippable by a child who may tumble in head first.